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Dylan T. Moore

@dylantmoore.bsky.social
303 followers 949 following 35 posts

Tax economist (optimal taxation, bunching methods, behavio(u)ral PF, political economy). Canadian expat. Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization (UHERO) & University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Economics.

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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Let me close by noting that one of the best job benefits is heavily subsidized faculty housing for new professors, located in the aforementioned valley of Mānoa (pictured below). It is walking distance from the econ department. 5/5
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Re: the PF position, the ideal applicant would be interested contributing to our budding research partnership with the HI Department of Taxation, helping them to use their admin data for conducting policy-relevant research. The ideal applicant also enjoys plumeria trees. 4/5
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
We can hire at either the assistant or associate level for both positions, and welcome applications from everyone: new PhDs, folks with existing faculty positions, and/or those with policy experience outside academia. Did I mention how many rainbows you'll see working here? 3/5
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Both are academic research positions, with reduced teaching loads, and an expectation of contributing to UHERO's policy outreach work in HI. There are very real opportunities for impacting public policy through a role at UHERO. For example: bsky.app/profile/dyla... 2/5
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Want to live and work in this beautiful mountain valley in Hawaiʻi? #econsky The University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization (UHERO) is hiring for 2 TT positions: -> Public Finance/Tax: aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... -> Macro/tourism/forecasting: aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... More below 1/5
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Reposted by Dylan T. Moore
Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
I need the “Campaign in prose. Govern in econometrics.” t-shirt.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
With highly technical material, quality varies a lot, but having a reasoning model do this improves things a lot, especially if the paper is well written. Customizing the prompt can help a lot too. Mine includes my technical background, preferences on how to discuss technical details, etc.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
DIY is best. Pick your fav reasoning model, upload PDF, tell it you want a summary that you can give to a text to speech model. Copy & paste into the ElevenLabs phone app to get amazing text to speech for free. I use Gemini flash thinking, with a detailed prompt. Free here: aistudio.google.com
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
How good are these things? Very much good enough to be useful for my work. If they add LaTeX rendering functionality to ChatGPT's Canvas feature, now that it has o1, it would become my new default workspace for any new task like this.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Ex: in one such prompt, a demand function was needed, o1 and Gemini assumed a linear demand function unless explicitly told not to. By contrast, Deepseek formally examined the implications of a nonlinear demand function without being asked. I'd prefer that approach personally.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
So is there anything Deepseek does better? If I ask it to complete a slightly less well defined task, such as "write up a model that has XYZ properties, and derive the solution" it seems to propose slightly more general modeling frameworks than the other models discussed above.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
I have encountered a few other cases like this. And given the other advantages of Gemini's "Thinking" model, it would be my go to choice for someone looking to use reasoning models for this kind of task without paying for it. Note, as with deepseek, you can see the "reasoning" output of the model.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
The same error as Claude
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
But Deepseek-r1 makes an error
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Here's o1-mini
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Here's Gemini's newest "thinking" model, with a weird formatting issue, but still correct
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Here's o1, with the right answer. o1-pro gets it also, naturally.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Here's an example of the kind of task I mean. This is for an actual project, and is certainly simple enough to do, but a tad tedious. It sure would be nice to outsource it to a virtual RA, but only if I can trust the results!
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
That last point is important because - like Deepseek - this is a model anyone can use for free: aistudio.google.com And it has a much larger context window than Deepseek. No difficult reading an entire paper, or set of papers, and working through them with you.
aistudio.google.com
Google AI Studio
Google AI Studio is the fastest way to start building with Gemini, our next generation family of multimodal generative AI models.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
My tests of Deepseek so far indicate consistently weaker performance than o1-pro & also regular o1 on basic applied theory tasks in econ. Often o1-mini also outperforms it. More interestingly, Gemini's latest "thinking" model outperforms Deepseek on my tasks more often than not.
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Reposted by Dylan T. Moore
Ben Golub @bengolub.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus. As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees. 1/
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
For lots of simple math tasks, I'm still finding it better than Claude, but this was an interesting exception. It isn't that it got the setup of the model wrong, it got the execution wrong, and in a relatively basic way.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
What's worse, it o1 knew what the final formula needed to look like, so it corrected itself towards the end with some handwaving to make the needed terms magically reappear. When I tried to correct it multiple times, it dug in, insisting it had things right.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Let me say though, when I asked it to present the derivation of the standard optimal nonlinear income tax formula using the perturbation approach (formally, using Gateaux derivatives, etc) it failed, ignoring the behavioral response effects of tax reforms. Claude 3.5 Sonnet nailed it.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
If you do applied theory in econ, and you haven't tried using ChatGPT o1 yet, give it a go. It is much better than earlier models at doing math reliably. Deriving and interpreting FOCs. Doing simple comparative statics. Developing model extensions. It is good enough to be very useful!
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 25/10/2024
That said, I think the oversight/editing of model output can require more attention, focus, and cognitive effort in a given moment than if you did the task yourself. Usually things go awry for me if I try to use it without exerting the necessary effort. When I do, it saves a lot of time.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 25/10/2024
I basically agree with this but (at least for me) research involves a lot of tasks that I am capable of performing but which are relatively tedious. I agree it can make things worse or take longer if you don't put serious effort into oversight, but that still saves me a lot of time.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 25/10/2024
Not a good literature review tool. Absolutely a good research tool for coding, writing, and in the recent versions even some simple math. As long as you pay attention to what it's doing and don't substitute it for your own judgement.
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
A related benefit: it turns out the climate in Mānoa is particularly well-suited to the production of rainbows. Within a year of moving here (maybe less), I saw more rainbows than I had in my entire life previously. 3/3
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
One of the best job benefits is heavily subsidized faculty housing for new professors, located in the aforementioned valley of Mānoa. The department is walking distance from faculty housing. Every day, I walk past numerous plumeria trees. 2/3
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
Repost from twitter, w/ new pics... Want to live and work in this beautiful mountain valley in Hawaiʻi? UH Mānoa Econ is hiring a TT AP in the Economics of Inequality. aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Our definition of inequality is very broad. If you do anything inequality-related, please apply. 1/3
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
While it may take time to make the rule change (& prepare for the increased caseload, etc), it seems clear the state is committed to making the change. Remarkably, this announcement came little over a month after Nate & first stumbled across this opportunity. 6/6 Backstory in a future thread...
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
If the net income limit were removed the state's only cost would be 50% of the extra SNAP admin costs that result. For Hawaii, this is a very cheap way to get $ to needy families. As such, we reached out to state officials about the matter. The result: 5/6
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
My estimates suggest that removing the net income limit could result in an additional 13-14,000 HI households receiving SNAP benefits each month, delivering $40-45M in federally-funded benefits annually. The effects may well be larger if there are positive take-up effects. 4/6
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
Under current HI rules, a household whose net income goes even $1 over the federal poverty line loses all their SNAP benefits. For a family of 4, this amounts to $900/month (>$10K/year). These steep "benefit cliffs" raise concerns about both fairness and disincentive effects. 3/6
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
Since 2000, states have been able to expand SNAP eligibility via Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility (BBCE). In 2010, Hawaiʻi used BBCE to increase gross income limits and removing asset limits. But, unlike most states, HI has not removed a limit on net income (after deductions) 2/6
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Dylan T. Moore @dylantmoore.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
That one time I found $45m/year lying around... uhero.hawaii.edu/hawai%CA%BBi... Just over a month ago, Nate Hix (Hawaii Public Health Institute) & I stumbled across an opportunity to expand HI’s SNAP benefits through a simple rule change. (This thread is a repost of one from the bad place) 1/6
uhero.hawaii.edu
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